It swept over me somehow, drowningly, that this was the secret that the dead know, how to belong to all of us. They had no bond, how could they be unfaithful? For a moment I was caught up by the thought to nobility. "Look here, Henrietta, if you feel that way, I'll leave it to you. I'll not come here any more." I did not know what else I could do about it. "It's the least you _can_ do." She was accepting it as her right. Any woman will understand how I wanted to lay my hand there, above his breast. She must really have believed I did not love him. I turned back across the borders. "Good-bye, Henrietta." She made a nearly inarticulate sound. The last I saw of her in the dusk she was tucking her flowers into the fresh sod as one tucks a coverlet about a child. He had been, I suppose, both man and child to her. BOOK III CHAPTER I I have to take up my story again about eighteen months later at the point of my going out to Suburbia to ask Gerald McDermott for a part in his new play, which was being rehearsed with Sarah in the _rôle_ of _Bettina_. But before that there had been some rather mortifying experiences to teach me that though I was done with Higgleston, it was, to a certainty, not done with me. In any case I suppose the shock of my husband's death must have affected my work unfavourably, but the knowledge of his secret defection, and the excuse he found for it in what was best in me, made still corroding poison at the bottom of my wound. What it all amounted to in my career was that the season which should have swept me back to Chicago in triumphant establishment of my gift, trickled out in faint praise and cold esteem. It was not that you could place your finger and say just there was the difficulty, but what came of it was another year on the road with Cline and Erskine, in stock. The Hardings, notwithstanding their disappointment in what they expected to make of me, managed to be kind. "You'll pull up," they assured me; "it's because you are really an artist that you show what you've been through!" And they didn't know the half of what that was. To Henry Mills my engagement with Cline and Erskine, was a step forward into that blazoned and banal professionalism which passes in America for dramatic success; but Sarah knew, and I think I knew myself, that the dance they led us in the spotlight of copious advertisement, was a dance of death to much that the plastic art should be. In this instance it was demonstrated even to the hopeful eye of Henry Mills, for the play chosen proved so little suited to the semi-rural, Middle West cities where we played it, that before the season was half over we were recalled, and, after an empty interval, finished out the engagement in one of those sensation mongering shows with which such combinations as Cline and Erskine clutch at the fleeing skirts of a public they never understand.